


Dying Leaves Need Time to Fall

by HindsightHero



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Post-The Raven King, Still can't kiss, arboreal feelings, canon-verse, risqué roadside intimacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 04:56:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10550432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HindsightHero/pseuds/HindsightHero
Summary: To be in Cabeswater was to be among magic. To be held by Cabeswater though…. With human hands and a human heart—That was something else entirely.It had been months since that day, but still, Blue wondered why Gansey never talked about it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Because I think an unhealthy amount about bluesey and trees and technicalities.  
> Also hey-o whats up, first TRC fic.

       To be in Cabeswater was to be among magic. A tangible presence. Something that went far beyond the ring of a phone in 300 Fox Way. It was more than the sight of incense drifting up to the ceiling as Blue got home from school, or the whistle of the tea kettle as it brewed another noxious blend of tea. Blue had literally grown up with magic. Watching it surround her and form her life. But that wasn’t Cabeswater. The forest was immeasurable in a way that made a house full of psychics feel mundane. It was a location that seemed to summarize that hitch in your breath before a tarot card was flipped. A place that stood between questions and answers. Between knowing and not knowing, and Blue adored it. She was enchanted by it. Mesmerized by its expansive, limitless, undefinable everything.

       To walk between its trees and stare up was a real life dream.

       To be held by Cabeswater though…. With human hands and a human heart—

       That was something else entirely.

       Blue knew that realistically speaking, a forest couldn’t become a person. But she also knew from first hand experience that a person could very much become a tree, so in that sense, the idea of dating a magical forest wasn’t as impossible a thing as others might think. It was an odd, uncomfortable appeal, if anything.

       Still, sometimes, she wanted to ask.

       On those nights afterwards, where Gansey would hold her close, his arms wrapped around Blue with nothing but the stars overhead. When mint blended with the dust of the roadside or the hum of a motel air-conditioner. When his face was warm and their cheeks pressed together, she could feel it. A static in the soul. A glitching, dreamy sort of aura that could only be noticed if you knew what to look for.

        If you knew what he had once been.

        What it felt like to kiss Gansey, and feel him collapse in the rain among the misty hills just beyond Henrietta. A boy, a king, falling to the ground in a death framed by golden leaves instead of the crown he deserved. Who was much happier with the leaves anyways.

        But Blue also knew what it was like to pick him up again. To hold him close, renewed. Re-awoken. To feel in his breath, and the first new pearlescent smile, to know that his chemistry had changed. Something small but something vast. Unknowable.

        Yet something that had always been.

        That summer, when the sun was high and the air grew warm inside the Pig, some five hundred miles into their epic adventure, Blue caught herself staring down at Gansey’s hand. As his fingers held firm on the pleather wheel. Veins risen and blue and branch like. Stretching out and twisting in an all too familiar way.

        Did he feel it? She wondered. Could he feel it too?

        She never got the chance to talk to Adam about it. Not when it mattered.

        How he felt being connected to Cabeswater, that is.

        Of course at the time she didn’t see much of a point in asking. For Blue, it was different. Similar but not the same. The pull of stars and the feeling of roots below her feet was just a dream. A comforting space to turn to. A part of her, but, one that didn’t really matter when there were dead kings to find and when others could pull children from their dreams as easy as flowers. And although the forest had been a part of him, she had never been sure that for Adam, Cabeswater was much of a comforting thing at all.

        Magical, sure.

        But it also owned him, and Blue knew Adam’s feelings on things like that. Even if they seemed nice half the time.

 

       Now, sitting there as the mile markers passed, and as Henry sat with his legs outstretched and his bright white shoes on the door asleep, Blue struggled to pull her gaze away from the shadows as they moved on Gansey’s hands.

       Finally the thought escaped her lips.

       “What’s it like?”

        Gansey looked to her as the sun filtered in, reflecting off his gold rimmed glasses. She hated how such a simple thing could be so beautiful. Or distracting. “What’s what like?” He asked.

        Blue rubbed a finger along the top of her own hand, tracing the smaller, similar patterns. “I mean do you feel it?” She asked him after a moment. “Cabeswater.”

        Gansey looked back to the road ahead. “I don’t know what you mean, Jane.”

       “It’s not a stupid question,” she argued. “And you do too know what I mean. But you never talk about it. I just want to know.”

        Gansey frowned. He opened his mouth to answer, and then shut it tight. If his hands weren’t on the wheel, Blue knew his thumb would’ve risen to his lip. But it was trapped by responsibility. Thankfully.

        The truth was, Gansey didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t _like_ to think about it. Thinking about it made him want to scribble down notes. It made him paranoid. Itching. Inhuman.

        Undeserving.

        It made him stay up too late because his heart felt like morning but his eyes saw the moon and he finally, maybe, knew _why_. It made him hum with unease as blood pumped through arteries. It made little things like cold floorboards on bare feet seem like foreign miracles but yet, something simple and familiar from childhood.

        He took a breath. “I’m just me. That’s all there—”

        “Bullshit.” Blue interrupted and sunk in her seat. “Don’t say that’s all there is. Don’t say that.”

        His fingers tightened on the wheel. “Well, what _do_ you want me to say?”

        “Anything! Something.”

         In the backseat, Henry stirred, a rustle of clothing and the muffled beats of Korean pop music leaking out from his headphones. When Blue spoke again her voice was lower. “You’re a fucking forest.”

       “Well you’re a tree,” Gansey reasoned.

       “Exactly! That’s why I want to know! If there’s anyone you should be able to talk to about complex arboreal feelings it should be me.”

        His lip twitched, “Arboreal?”

        Blue huffed. “You’re avoiding the topic.”

        Gansey thinned his lips. “I know...I know.”

        “Is something wrong?” she asked. “Is that why you won’t talk about it?"

        “No, it’s just—” he started, and then stopped.

        It didn’t feel like a very Gansey thing to do but that’s what this all boiled down to. How Cabeswater made him feel less Gansey than anything else. But also more. That those words shouldn’t have made any sense but yet they did.

       “I don’t know what to say,” he confessed. “I don’t—” Gansey paused again. “I wasn’t there. When it happened. I just was, and then, I wasn’t. And I knew what I felt like before. But when I came back… It was like I was never gone, and like I’d been gone a long time.”

        “What?”

        He tried again. “It’s like this whole time, when I was searching, it felt like deja vu. Like there was a path and it was familiar, but I couldn’t explain it. But I kept going. That’s what always motivated me. But now that feeling feels...strange.”

        “You mean like being psychic?”

        Blue wasn’t sure but she remembered an aunt wandering into the house once when she was 7 or 8 who got premonitions like that. Who always claimed she was living two minutes faster than everyone else.

        Mostly she was just annoying and stole all the hot water before anyone else got the chance to shower.

       “No.” Gansey explained. “More like, time wasn’t real. Like I was in two places at once but didn’t know where else I was. It was how I always felt after I died. The first time. ”

        “What’s that got to do with Cabeswater?”

        “Everything.” he told her. “Because now I still feel that way but it’s stronger. I have a name to it but I don’t understand it anymore. There’s so much that I can’t explain, Jane. That’s why I don’t talk about it. I’m grateful I’m back. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect to be here right now. That this summer could happen. That we’d get to graduate together and I could cheer you on. That I’d get to even see you again or hold you or-”

        “You’re getting mushy,” she warned, and Gansey only looked at her.

        “I know I’m different now. I’ve got memories that shouldn’t be mine,” he said. “Memories of Ronan carving things. Into me but not into me. Of Adam. Of what I took. What Cabeswater took.”

         Blue fell silent. She tried not to imagine the Demon. If Gansey remembered anything of that in the same way. But one look at his face told her the answer.

         Gansey let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

        “I’m not good at being magic. I’m not you.”

        “Well I’m not exactly good at being magic either,” she said, then, when she could no longer stand the expression on her boyfriend’s face - the down turned lips, the worried eyes, she looked away and out the window. “Have you tried talking to Ronan?”

        “About this?”

         Blue shrugged. If anyone was going to understand unexplainable magic it was going to be that boy.

         Gansey changed lanes to get around an 18-wheeler. Then, at last he said, “No.”

        “Why not?”

        “He’s happy,” said Gansey simply. “Adam hasn’t left for college yet. He’s at the Barns with Opal. And, to be honest, ever since that day...”

         Blue looked at him. A Golden boy at a loss for words. Worried sick at a simple conversation. Although, she knew nothing about it was simple.

 

        They had spent the hours and days and weeks after the incident in an awkward silence. A sort of hesitation. Like if anyone were to doubt it, or second guess what had happened then they would all arrive back at that place. With Ronan’s face still smeared in black and Henry’s Aglionby sweater still wet from rain on Gansey’s square, royal shoulders as he fell.

        To Adam tied up in the back, helpless, forgotten and screaming as every bit of their world crumbled into chaos on the side of the road.

        It was all over but none of them knew what that meant. So the happiness was as fragile as eggshells, and the tough conversations, like this one that Blue now regretted starting, were ignored for more hopeful, easy things.

        Not that it did Gansey any good.

        Or any of them, for that matter.

        “You listen to me, Richard Campbell Gansey the Third,” ordered Blue to break the silence. “I still may not be able to kiss you, which, really sucks as far as non specific loopholes are concerned but if anything, that proves to me one thing.”

        He arched an eyebrow at her.

        “It’s that nothing has changed at all. You’re still annoying, and I know you’re still you because you overtip at restaurants and you get this weird look on your face every time we pass a gas station. You’re almost obsessively concerned that a car without an engine will still break down. And you seem almost eager for it happen. So, if you want to have a mid-life, second-life crisis because your soul is made from a bunch of magic shaped trees then I won’t stop you. But if the reason you've been avoiding it, and not talking to me about it, is because you feel some sort of weird guilt or whatever? That you think you’re not you? Tch,” she scoffed and kicked her feet up onto the dashboard. “Believe me. You’re still Gansey.”

        The words finished, and Gansey stared forward at the road. Then, slowly, he outstretched his hand, letting it hover between their seats. Palm up to face her. Blue looked down and then reached her fingers out to his, running the small, chipped nail polish covered tips along the lines in his palm. Then, gently, she flipped his hand over, and traced the veins.

        “You know, everytime I see these, I think of branches. Or roots going down. Sometimes I look in the mirror and when my eyes are red and bloodshot, it makes me think of Adam. Of what he sacrificed. Like little branches trying to steal my pupils.”

        Gansey let out a small laugh. Blue, managed one as well.

        “It’s creepy. I know. But it also just reminds me that trees and people aren’t so different.”

         “You might be a little biased.”

         “I might.”

         He grinned, and intertwined their fingers. Gansey’s thumb stroking along her skin.

         “But, I guess... if it helps. You know, just— Just remember that Cabeswater became human for you,” she said. “You didn’t become Cabeswater.”

         “I....yeah. Thank you.”

         “I want you to be able to talk to me about it,” said Blue. “I know you’re a guy and guys are dumb with emotions and treat them like the plague and you’re rich so you’re even worse at it—”

        “Hey!”

        “I stand by my point. But, the thing is, magic is real,” said Blue, matter-of-factly. “It’s real and it’s what brought you back. Again. You don’t look it, Dick, but magic I think has always sort of favored you.”

        “I hardly think it’s favoring when it means we still can’t kiss.”

        “We’ll find a way,” she said assuredly. “Jimi knows herbs that increase psychic stuff so there’s bound to be ones that block it. Maybe there’s stones or crystals or something that’ll dull my charge enough to make it work.”

       Gansey hadn’t thought about that.

       He really should have.

       The fact Blue had apparently been thinking about this made his heart flutter in stupid ways. Then, he said, “We’re never escaping magic are we?”

       “ ‘Fraid not my Raven King.”

        “Hmm…”

        The car fell into silence again for a minute as the highway seemed to empty, and the fields stretched on ahead. Then, in an easy motion, Gansey pulled over onto the shoulder, and put the Pig in idle.

       Blue looked to him, confused. “Why did you—”

       But in a flash, the seat belt strained against Gansey’s teal polo, and the space between them shrank into nothing. Blue jolted away, her shoulder slamming into the glass of the passenger side window.

        “Dick, what the fu—?!”

        He stopped, body leaning awkwardly against the protesting strap, and then looked up at her. Blue stared back, eyes wide. Then, Gansey stretched his arm out, to take her hand once more, and guide it closer until at last, Blue’s shoulders relaxed, and she let her boyfriend pull her into him. Her hands splayed across his back as the air filled with mint and summer sweat. With pleather and warmth and Gansey.

        Gansey.

        Blue’s arms tightened around him as she held the boy close, and closer still. As her hair nestled itself awkwardly under his chin and her lips pressed into the cotton of a folded collar. She closed her eyes, and took a breath, as Gansey did the same.

       “You’re alive,” she said, although the words muffled against him, and Gansey’s spine shuttered at the gesture. He breathed in, and then out, and held her tight.

       “I know,” he whispered. “I know.”

       Blue let her eyes close. Her lashes ghosting along the skin of Gansey’s neck. The seat-belt dug into her ribs but she didn’t care. Instead, she listened to the sound of hurried breaths. To Gansey’s human breaths and the beating of his heart and how all that protected him was the stupid fabric of an overpriced polo.

       How she couldn’t stand the idea that when he held her like this he was anything but Gansey. Anything other than the stupid stately boy with boat shoes and horrendous summer fashion sense. How she could let herself be distracted with veins and trees and branches when his skin was warm and real in front of her.

       Even if there was a magic, even if she sensed it like a current under his skin, there was no way to separate it. This was Gansey.

       And as her lips brushed against the ugly polo that defined him, Blue kissed it.

        Again, the spark shot its way down Gansey’s spine, and he tilted his head to press his cheek closer. To feel a single, dumb barrette pressing against his cheekbone. “Blue…” he warned softly, as his heart abandoned its calm and steady rhythm.

       But Blue ignored him, and moved her mouth to kiss the fabric of his shirt again. And then again, and again, and again.

       Every part of her wanted to keep going. To know what it felt like to move up beyond the safety of a shirt. For her lips to press warmly against his tanned skin. To taste his cologne in an all too literal manner.

       Blue wanted to keep going until her lips met his and their teeth could awkwardly clash and she could taste the mint along his tongue.

       But even such a thought was a nightmare. An imaginary motion too much to bear even now. And Gansey knew it. He knew it all too well.

       Something warm pressed against her scalp. Something soft, and gentle.Then again, just near her temple

       Gansey breathed out a kiss beside her ear.

       Finally, after an embarrassing shudder of her own, Blue pulled away, and the seatbelts screeched as two bodies separated, cheeks flushed and palms sweaty.

       The Pig went quiet, rocking as cars sped past.

       For too long, Blue and Gansey sat there, silent, staring forward as they tried to not miss the other’s touch. As they tried not to give in to temptation and lean in again.

        The vehicle lurched.

        “You know,” said a forgotten voice a few feet back, amidst the sound of shuffling clothes. “As endearing as a Polo-kink is, and believe me if anyone was to give me a polo kink it’d be Dick Three here, you could also just try cellophane,” said Henry as he stretched. “It’s probably cheaper than a magical stone.”

        Blue’s head turned sharply. “How long have you been awake?”

        “Long enough my friends,” said the boy with a proud, all-too-knowing grin, “Long enough.”

        Gansey’s hands returned to the wheel as his head crashed into the headrest behind it. He closed his eyes and tried not to groan. Then, as Henry asked how close they were to lunchtime, a brush of fingers against his knee made Gansey’s eyes open again. To peer down as Blue traced small patterns on the bare flesh, indecently exposed from his khaki shorts.

       Finally, when he looked at her, Blue smiled and motioned to the road.

       The Pig roared.

       There was something unexplainable about Cabeswater, Blue realized. Something confusing and twisting and changing. Growing up that’s what magic was. A thing of non-specifics and shifting landscapes. Of being promised one thing and getting something else. A disappointing thing.

       But staring forward at two warm eyes and a set of still flushed cheeks, Blue knew exactly who she was looking at. Who it was she had stupidly fallen in love with. It wasn’t some forest or some strange bit of magic. It was a boy too rich for his own good. Who died more times than anyone had any right to. Who laughed and obsessed and whose nervous habits came with a guidebook. A boy with a suitcase full of clothes worthy of The Hamptons and not a gritty cross country road trip.

       She knew Gansey hadn’t changed. Not at all. He was still a king, a human king, whose magicians made a forest bow to him. And maybe that was weird. Maybe it was odd and unsettling for him. But, Blue figured, if he needed her to, she could ignore the magic for him. The glitches that made the scent of soil mix with mint. If it helped. And when the time came that Gansey couldn’t sleep, or his body felt like it was in another place, she would be there, hands outstretched and eager under the stars.


End file.
